Good Morning Friends! First off sorry for the complete lack of a podcast this weekend. We were experiencing some severe weather and it seemed like a really bad idea to be sequestered up in my office as it was hitting. Next up I am bringing back Mixtape Mondays! For those who did not experience this last year, I had a semi-weekly running series where I gave you a brand new mixtape each Monday morning. I made it through twenty of them before my inspiration ran out, but recently I have been crafting Mixtapes again, and you my readers are benefiting from it.
For some backstory… I was one of those kids who was constantly making mixtapes. Since I was one of the few that had a stereo with dual cassette tapes, I had the ability to easily dub things. Growing up in a small town, when anyone got something… it was passed around heavily which lead to me crafting a lot of custom mixes for my friends. I have a specific love for the way songs flow together on an album, and I think the art of album creature has suffered in the era of buying individual songs on iTunes. So this series was my attempt to bring back the mixtape via Spotify and YouTube playlist. Since I have personally moved on to Tidal I am including those now as well.
Zombie Sexfiend
Most of my mixes have a starting point, and for this one it was Rob Zombie. I am cheating and including both a song from White Zombie and a song from his solo career… which is still more or less White Zombie. One of the things that I have had to do with this second generation… is go through all of my previous mixes and log them in a spreadsheet because it is getting too freaking hard to remember if I have used a song before or not. I have a few personal rules… never repeat a song I have used before and never repeat a band in the same mix. However I have found creative ways to cheat before… like on a mix that was Blink 182 focused I also included a bunch of things from Blink 182 adjacent side projects. This mix however is things that fit neatly into the auditory realm of White Zombie. I hope you all enjoy!
Track List
Jurassitol – Filter
More Human Than Human – White Zombie
The Chemicals Between Us – Bush
Guilty – Gravity Kills
Save Yourself – Stabbing Westward
The Perfect Drug – Nine Inch Nails
Just One Fix – Ministry
After the Flesh – My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult
That begins what is hopefully the second generation of Mixtape Mondays. This would be number twenty one if you count them sequentially however. I am uncertain how long I will be able to keep this going, but I do have several mixes that I am actively working on as well as a few that I have completed. I have a few things that I am working on that sort of stretch the boundaries of my musical tastes, so it will be interesting to see how those work out. As always if you are new to this series and want to catch up, you can check out the full archives here:
Good Morning Friends! It is time once more for me to present you with a blend of music for the week ahead. For those who might be new to my blog, every Monday for the past several months I have been presenting you with a new Mixtape. Sure it is actually just a YouTube or Spotify playlist, but I assembled it in the loving manner that I used to assemble custom mixtapes for my friends. I am uncertain how long inspiration will keep this section of the blog alive, but it has done so for twenty posts thus far.
Melancholeidoscope
Lately, I have been struggling a bit with melancholy, but it isn’t like it has just been one unified feeling but more a kaleidoscope of feelings. So there you go… this one is a portmanteau of those two words. Sometimes you listen to down songs because you are down… but also you are not looking to be cheered up and are fine with staying down. This journey all started when I heard something on the radio that I had not heard in years… and started to piece together an album around that song… and then proceeded to edit it out of the mix in the first place. It is funny how the creative process works sometimes, and your original inspiration is chucked aside for something new. Essentially this album is a mixture of some of my favorite melancholy songs. Some have hope for better days, and some just wallow in that feeling and that is okay. Sometimes we have to be down, but it helps to have friends along for the journey. A song can be like an old familiar friend that you have not visited in a really long time, and it similarly is amazing how many emotions come rushing back as soon as you open that door.
Track List
Everybody’s Changing – Keane
Iris – The Goo Goo Dolls
A Long December – Counting Crows
Romeo And Juliet – The Killers
Someday? – Concrete Blonde
One – U2
You Don’t Know How It Feels – Tom Petty
Walking After You – Foo Fighters
Runaway Train – Soul Asylum
Yellow Ledbetter – Pearl Jam
Patience – Guns N’ Roses
High and Dry – Radiohead
Brass in Pocket – Pretenders
Listen On Spotify
Listen On YouTube
And that friend is my twentieth mix, and I gotta be honest I was not sure this series would have lasted this long. I am not sure how many more of these I have in me, but I am going to keep creating when the inspiration strikes me. Sometimes an album builds itself. For this one each time I thought of a song to add, listening to it would make me think of another song and then I simply had to cull what no longer worked. I think at one point I had almost thirty songs on the list and whittled it down to the blend that I present today. As always if you are tuning into this series late and wanting to catch up you can check out the archive below.
Good Morning Friends! I apologize for missing a Mixtape Monday last week, but I was fully in holiday mode and not caring about the world one little bit. For anyone who might be new to my blog, every Monday I post a playlist full of songs that have been lovingly crafted like one would have done with a precious blank cassette tape. I think that was part of what made Mixtapes in general so carefully crafted because, to be honest… a pack of high-quality blank cassettes was freaking expensive. Like legitimately a pack of three quality tapes was about half the price of an album… which is fine but nothing that you felt like you could squander. Anyways… nostalgia trip finished because today I craft my mixes for you in modern formats like Spotify and YouTube playlists.
Mason and Librarian
Often times the mixes I share with you have a clear theme to them… and I have to be honest this is probably not going to be one of those. There is a theme, but it is a deeply personal theme that won’t actually relate to anyone outside of my own skull case. In late high school I had two wildly different friends that lived a few houses down from each other, and as one drifted further down paths that I did not want to follow… I ended up clinging to the other. The day I crafted this mix, I was thinking about the wild juxtaposition of these two friends because really at their core they could not be more different. One grew up to follow in his father’s footsteps and became a Stone Mason, and the other followed his childhood passions and become a Librarian. I don’t really have much connection anymore to the first one, but talk at least weekly to the second one and chances are he will actually see this mix at some point when he catches up on my blog. Like it won’t make much sense, but this is an album that reminds me of the two of them more than actually relates to them.
Track List
True Nature – Jane’s Addiction
Freak Scene – Dinosaur Jr.
Violet – Hole
Misery – Soul Asylum
Welcome to the Fold – Filter
Nothing – Stabbing Westward
Trippin’ on a Hole in a Paper Heart – Stone Temple Pilots
Sabotage – Beastie Boys
Points of Authority – Linkin Park
When Worlds Collide – Powerman 5000
Space Lord – Monster Magnet
Lay Lady Lay – Ministry
Pets – Porno for Pyros
Listen on Spotify
Listen On YouTube
With that, we close the nineteenth chapter in this Mixtape Monday series. This is one of my favorite ones to listen to because the same thoughts that lead me to choose this specific lineup are sort of now imbued in the final product, and listening makes me think about these two friends. I have a wealth of close acquaintances, but I have very few really close friends in the world that I have let down my armor in order to see me behind this facade. I am thankful some years back I reconnected with the Librarian, who is awesomely moving to my town and hopefully once the pandemic is a bit less scary we can do some real world shenanigans again. As always I hope you enjoyed this Mixtape and if you are new to the series you can find the entire series run over at the archives below.
Good Morning Friends! I return this morning with another segment in what is shaping up to be one of my longest-running series. Each Monday I present my readers with a collection of tracks bound together into a specific Mixtape. Since I can’t actually mail out a physical tape to each of you… and it isn’t like most of you would even have a player to play it on… I create a collection of tracks and present them on YouTube and Spotify for your listening pleasure. Along with this I create some fake album art so the entire thing feels like a complete package. I loved doing this as a kid and I still enjoy doing it as an adult, and I hope you enjoy the effort.
Faith Funk Fish
This is another mix that I have been sitting on for a while now, largely because I was uncertain if it was finished. The idea was pretty straight forward and I wanted to try and figure out a way to blend Faith No More, Living Colour, Fishbone and Bad Brains into the same mix tape. The core theme here is bands that have rock sensibilities but also have a fusion of funk with heavy bass lines. Some of these skew more punkish like Bad Brains and Helmet and others skew more melodic like King’s X and School of Fish. I’ve listened through this many times at this point, slightly pruning and tweaking until we have reached the point it is in currently. There are some times when you creation needs to just be left alone to stand on its own, and I feel that is more or less the case with this mix. I hope you all enjoy it.
Track List
Cult of Personality – Living Colour
Servitude – Fishbone
Tip – Finger Eleven
Falling to Pieces – Faith No More
Lakini’s Juice – Live
Unsung – Helmet
Levitate – I Mother Earth
Clean My Wounds – Corrosion of Conformity
A Shogun Named Marcus – Clutch
Thunder Kiss ’65 – White Zombie
I Against I – Bad Brains
It’s Love – King’s X
3 Strange Days – School of Fish
Listen on Spotify
Listen on YouTube
That brings to close the Eighteenth Mixtape in this series. As it stands I have one more left in the hopper, but I have a feeling that I am going to go on another bender of creating new mixes soon. This one is more delicate than some of the other ones I have released because it felt like it was a challenge to make it work. However I already have a few songs in my mind that didn’t fit into this one, that I will probably use to spin something new off in the near future. As always I hope you enjoyed this blend of songs and feel free to drop me a line below with your thoughts. If you are just now getting into this series, I keep and archive of all of the mixes so far.
